In our busy lives we don’t think much about rest, nor do we regard it as important or interesting.

Rest is something we do if we have time or if we’re not too busy. Rest is simple: it’s inactivity, or a negative space defined by the absence of work. And if we treat overwork as a virtue or sign of ambition, we may even see rest as weakness. But as I argue in my new book Rest: Why We Get More Done When We Work Less, each of these assumptions are incorrect. In fact, some of history’s most creative and prolific people worked far fewer hours than we do, while accomplishing much more.